Hi,
Dr.
Denise Webb here,
Clinical psychologist.
Welcome to my video series on emotional neglect.
Today I'm going to talk about how emotional neglect happens,
Why it's so invisible,
And how to know if you have it.
In a moment,
I'm going to explain why it's so hard to remember and why people have such a hard time knowing if they grew up with emotional neglect.
And I'm also going to explain how to know and how to figure out if you grew up with emotional neglect or not.
But first,
I want to spend a moment to explain what emotional neglect actually is and how it happens.
So imagine that you are a child.
And you have something difficult happen that day or going on in your life.
For example,
Let's say you're being bullied at school.
Let's say you're struggling in some academic courses in school.
Or let's say you're just having some problems with some friends.
Anything that can happen in a child's life that causes him or her stress.
Imagine this is you.
And that you come home with some stress or some sadness or some anger or some hurt on your little face,
Or if you're a teenager,
On your teenage face.
Body and body language and no one in your family appears to take note of this.
And you go through your days with people not understanding or noticing that you are having a struggle with something.
So no one says,
Hey,
What's going on with you?
You don't seem quite right.
Or you look upset.
Did something happen at school today?
What is wrong?
I can tell that something is wrong.
And no one talks to you about what you're feeling and why you're feeling it.
It helps you think through using your emotions and your brain.
To work together to figure out what is going on inside of you and why and what to do about it.
Kids who grow up without enough of that kind of emotional attention from their parents And up.
With a particular set of struggles.
After they grow up.
And I'm going to explain those in just a minute.
But first.
I want to talk about why it's so hard to remember this.
As I just explained,
Emotional neglect happens in what doesn't occur for you as a child.
So it's not something that happens to you like an event.
I describe it as the background in the family picture.
It's something that doesn't happen.
You're not asked enough.
You're not talked with enough.
You're not discussed enough.
Enough about emotions and your feelings and what's going on inside of you.
These things don't happen for you.
And because they're events that don't happen,
Your brain doesn't record it as a child.
You just assume this is what all families are like.
And you assume that everyone else is living in the same world.
Little do you know that that's not the case.
But when you grow up,
You have no memory of what didn't happen.
And so this is why I can't ask you a person in my office Did you grow up with emotional neglect?
99.
9% of them will say no.
Because they have no memory of this happening.
It has to be figured out in some other way,
Which I'm going to talk about in just a minute.
But the problem is,
When you grow up this way,
You basically have to survive in your childhood home.
And in order to do that,
In order to be able to get by in a family that is not paying attention to the feelings of its members,
The very definition of emotional neglect.
In order to get by the only choice you have.
Is to basically build a wall to block off your feelings.
So that way your feelings will not be in the way.
You are hiding them,
Not just from your parents.
But in order to hide them from your parents,
You also end up hiding them from yourself.
And so children who grow up this way grow up with this wall and their feelings are on the other side of it.
Sometimes a strong emotion may break through and reach you,
But most feelings,
If they're not intense,
Or don't go on for a long time,
We'll just stay over there.
And if you do feel them,
It's in a sort of a muted sort of way.
So what happens then?
The child who grows up this way ends up as an adult with a particular set of symptoms or struggles.
And I started seeing this pattern over and over in my clients and it's why I'm so passionate about helping people understand.
What childhood emotional neglect is.
Basically,
When you grow up with your feelings blocked off,
You end up having problems knowing what you're feeling and why.
So you may end up even feeling guilty about having feelings.
You're trying to hide them.
You're taught,
Inadvertently maybe,
By your parents.
That you should be ashamed of your feelings and you should hide them.
So people who.
.
.
Grew up this way,
End up maybe judging themselves for having feelings,
Which none of us can choose our feelings.
They just come to us.
And it's what we do with our feelings that we can and should judge ourselves for,
Not for having them.
We don't get to choose our feelings.
We only get to choose what we do with them.
But people who grow up with emotional neglect do tend to judge themselves for having normal,
Human,
Biologically based feelings that come to them.
They end up minimizing their own feelings,
Which causes them to doubt themselves in lots of different situations.
If you don't trust your feelings.
To guide you.
Who are you going to trust?
Maybe all the people around you who you rely on too much to inform you and guide you.
Or maybe you just feel lost,
Alone,
And you don't even ask for guidance because you feel like that's wrong too.
Because maybe your parents didn't give you all that much guidance either since they weren't really tuned in when they were meant to be.
So the other thing that happens is for a person who grew up with emotional neglect is they end up being overly focused on other people and not enough on themselves and their own internal world.
They end up being overly giving to others and not enough to themselves.
Because they are busy devaluing the most vital.
Most personal part of who they are,
Their feelings.
Your feelings are the most important.
Valuable feedback system you have in your life.
To inform you about who you are,
What you want,
What you need,
What to pursue,
What to avoid.
Your feelings will tell you all of this when you are tuned in.
But when they're on the other side of that wall,
You can end up feeling kind of lost.
What should I do next?
And it makes you very vulnerable to basically kind of going with wherever the wind takes you.
And that doesn't necessarily lead to a happy,
Healthy,
Thriving life.
The problem is none of these people who grew up this way deserve it.
And many of them end up blaming their adult struggles on themselves because they can't remember that anything went wrong for them in childhood.
So they just assume,
This is me.
I'm flawed.
This is how I am.
I don't want any of this for you and if any of it is sounding like maybe it applies to you,
Fortunately,
There is a way to figure out if you grew up with emotional neglect.
I designed it.
Exactly for the reason that people can't remember it.
Is called the Emotional Neglect Questionnaire.
And it's a very quick.
Test that consists of about 23 questions,
Maybe it's 26,
Yes,
No,
And it's questions about your adult life now and how you feel in various situations.
And how you experience the world,
And that is the best way to find out if you have emotional neglect from your childhood or not,
And if you're living with it.
Please let me know in the comments.
What you think about this,
If you think it affected you,
If you have questions about it.
Share with me and with others your own thoughts about it.
I'll be making more videos on childhood emotional neglect and how it affects you as an adult.
This is going to be a whole series that's going to really cover everything you want to know about emotional neglect.
My next video on emotional neglect,
I'm going to be talking about four subtle but necessary things that you may have missed growing up if you were raised in an emotionally neglectful family.
And they're very important things for you to know.
Thank you so very much for watching.
And I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
Take care in between.
Bye bye.
